ALM Works

An early version of Structure for Jira. How things have changed!

Q: Why did you found ALM Works?

Igor Sereda: Ever since I graduated, I’ve wanted to create software. My first jobs were in software design services, but I always dreamed of inventing something myself.

Q: How’d you come up with the idea for Structure?

IS: I listened to customers! I had been using (and loving) Jira for years, and I really admired Atlassian’s “Open Company/No Bullshit” core value. All Atlassian feature requests are in a publicly accessible Jira instance, so it has always been easy to see what Jira users are hoping for.

“Open Company/No Bullshit” definitely infuses the culture here at ALM Works -- customers can always submit and upvote design ideas at our User Voice page.

Anyway, I studied the Jira feature requests with the most votes. I looked for things customers struggle with that could be solved with an app. That’s how I found the infamous JRA-4446, the request for sub-tasks of sub-tasks.

I thought “Huh, I can fix this.” So that’s how I started to develop Structure in 2010. I went underwater for eight months developing the early version and showed it to other Atlassian partners on a 5-minute lightning talk at AtlasCamp in 2010.

We were so excited when we first released Structure, we made this Star Wars parody video.

Q: Wow. That’s really nerdy and I like it!

IS: Thanks!

Q: What customer pain points was Structure designed to fix?

IS: The initial feature request that served as the spark was simply a request for more hierarchy depth, but our solution ended up going beyond that request.

I realized that it’s not enough for project managers to have just a huge collection issues, and a query engine to search through them. There should be a way to organize these records into groups and sub-groups, and easy ways to visualize those relationships. We really designed for the project and portfolio managers who need the flexibility and high visibility.

Only 1,259 upvotes. No big deal!

Q: Atlassian ultimately closed that ticket as a “Won’t do” late last year, bold move don’t you think?

IS: You know, it’s a valid approach for Atlassian to be selective about what problems to solve! Adding hierarchy is a pretty complicated endeavor, and it just wasn’t the direction they wanted to take the product for all their users.

And of course I’m glad Atlassian leaves turf for other companies to solve problems. Letting 3rd-party vendors take care of things like this is pretty genius. Because we’re a smaller company (and aren’t getting pulled in a million directions) we can focus on executing this solution really well.

Q: Has the evolution of Structure taken you by surprise?

IS: You bet! We originally built Structure as a solution to a specific problem — the lack of hierarchy beyond Epic > Story > Sub-task. What we ended up building was a tool with thousands of use cases, a Swiss Army knife for Jira, if you will. That’s when we realized it would be a game-changer for large organizations.

And, we didn’t want to stop there, so we introduced the API and started integrating with other apps. Structure has even more potential now that other vendors can extend Structure (just like we did, with Jira).

Then we thought, why don’t we use this API ourselves? So we started creating Structure extensions, which are tightly-integrated apps for our app (so meta, right?). We built Structure.Testy as a lightweight solution for software testing, and Structure.Pages to bring Confluence and Jira together.

Finally, we’ve recently introduced Structure.Gantt. We think it’s a really exciting take on Gantt charts in Jira, all based on the Structure app. We’ve been hearing great feedback about the value Gantt charts add to Structure.

Q: How do you, personally, use Structure in your day-to-day?

IS: I use Structure in so many different ways, I'm not sure I can remember them all.

We have per-product structures that our project managers use for planning -- with issues broken down by Sprint and sorted by the WSJF (“weighted shortest job first”, counted through Structure’s formulas feature). They let me see at a glance how things are going.

Our support team uses Jira Service Desk. I have a structure there to monitor the current work being done by the team, broken down by the Assignee, displaying SLAs and other metrics. I find it more convenient than regular Service Desk queues.

The recent launch of Structure.Gantt was a project in itself, so we planned and executed using… Structure.Gantt. It was wonderful to get the first-hand experience using our product before it was launched.

We have a delivery checklist, supported by Structure.Testy. I typically have a few tasks on that checklist and it’s easy for me to open it and see if I need to do anything for upcoming releases.

At last but not least, I’m like many of our customers in that I use our Structure Board interface to do most routine things in Jira, like creating, editing, and searching for issues. I find I can do whatever I need to do with Jira a little more efficiently in Structure.

Igor’s real-life Structure Delivery checklist...with Structure.Testy.

Q: What’s next for Structure? Are you working on any new products or major new features?

IS: There’s a lot in the pipeline. Our Gantt chart solution is still version 1.0 -- it’s a pretty good Gantt chart already, but there are some big features we’re still working on. Constrained automated planning (a.k.a. resource levelling) and centralized resource management are both coming down the road.

Structure 5.0 is slated for release in the next few months, and it will have several major improvements. We’re looking to making our Automation feature even more flexible and powerful, while giving Jira administrators more controls to limit that power.

And I’m excited about our newest project -- bringing Structure to Jira Cloud. We’re hoping to roll this out at the end of 2018. Adapting Structure to the cloud is a huge undertaking because the technology is so much different, but we’re really excited to expand Structure’s availability to Cloud customers.

And then we’ve got more long term dreams. We hope to be able to bring together, organize and structure not only Jira issues, but also Confluence pages, Bitbucket pull requests, Trello boards, and much more.

Wish us luck!